Hey FDevs,
The LTD mining is way too overpowered and it renders all other activities to be mostly useless from the in-game perspective.
Right now there are two different issues with mining:
1. Respawn bugs on re-login and even when flying away (~25km) on a launched fighter (while the ship is near the asteroid!).
That one I guess should not be explained and definitely need to be fixed.
2.1. Overall resources hotspot mechanic. It can be slightly changed to avoid imbalanced things such as Borann triple-spot and the new COL system triple spot.
The only thing need to add is to deplet the hotspot in general if there are a lot of resources extracted (by all the players). After it's depleted, a new spot can be spawned in some time, on another random place.
I guess the hotspots places are bound to the random seed and so they have fixed positions, but I believe it should be near to trivial to use time/date-based random for the hotspot spawning positions, separate for each hotspot.
2.2 Another spawn related issue is that for each instance the asteroids have own resource pool. It can be improved that the asteroids are exactly the same for all the players, and if one asteroid is depleted by a player, it should be marked as such for all the players, so can't be mined by relogging or using different accounts. That will also fix the "mapped mining" thing.
2.3 Another way is to make all the asteroid moving in space, in addition to rotation. Can be difficult to make since it will create a lot of chaos and probably will require a lot of performance if done naively, but I believe it can be implemented via semi-random trajectories based on time, so each client can calculate the asteroid's position at any moment.
3. Implement supply/demand mechanic - stop stations to buy the resources over their demand, or reduce prices dynamically based on how much items are sold or purchased by players. E.g. if players sell A LOT of LTDs, then stations should stop to buy them or reduce the price significantly, not just for a single station, rather for a whole region, at least.
4. COMPLETELY different approach: to make other activities to be more useful, such as missions, bounties, etc. Though it will require to huge rebalance for all the prices…
Hope for any feedback from FDevs on the mining issues…